@jon_jeckell I suspect a lot of this trafficking has less to do with gratification and more to do with power relationship[s]

@blueberrio Because prostitution has more to do with power and degradation than mechanics.

Spend about five minutes reading the stories of women, children and men who have been trafficked and it becomes apparent that for most of their clients, the interaction is about degradation, not sex. It’s easy to say that some day we’ll have perfect simulacra of human beings – at which point their consequences for the sex trade will be the least of the issues worth discussing. But what kind of power dynamics, if any, can there be between a person and an incompletely realized, not-quite-human robot?

Remember when you thought Apple’s shiny iDevices were turned out in spotless factories by gleaming machines, and it turned out that human beings in Foxconn factories in China were cheaper, so actually, the iPhone is the most exquisitely machined hand-made object in history?

4. The Uncanny Valley

@atavistian How do you program a lip-twitch to not look like a software bug?

Child pornography and depictions of sex with children are illegal. One million children are sold into sex slavery every year. Even if you could create perfectly life-like artificial sex partners, who would condone creating versions of them that looked like children? So, the demand will remain.